Doctor Who 18x26

Matthew Waterhouse as Adric • Tom Georgeson as Detective Inspector • Anthony Ainley as The Master (voice)

The Doctor, aware that his time may soon be ending, travels to the Logopolis where a series of fateful events are set in motion.

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1. "What is the message of the Cloister Bell? How does a cure become a trap? Who is the intruder in the Cloister Room?" (Radio Times)

2. This episode was first shown on 7 March 1981.

3. It was seen by 7.7 million viewers.

4. This sequence arose from the dramatic need to establish that the Master really is as evil as everyone says he is.

5. He needed to be shown, early on, to have done something really nasty.

6. Like a lot of nasty things in Doctor Who, it was devised by scriptwriter Robert Holmes for the Master's debut serial in 1971.

7. Filming for this sequence, on 19 December, was disrupted by bad weather.

8. It was Matthew Waterhouse's nineteenth birthday, and the production team arranged for him to have a cake.

9. While the rain poured down, the cast huddled under the producer's umbrella, amusing themselves playing charades.

10. The seat of Adric's trousers betrays the fact that this was shot after he'd sat on the wet grass.

11. In the earliest version, both the Doctor and Adric are arrested, and Adric effects their escape using his "unorthodox talents",

12. presumably involving his talent for picking locks - including those of police handcuffs.

13. This was amended after Barry Letts pointed out that the Doctor has done nothing to justify an arrest:

14. "They'd be in dead trouble with the Super if they went around arresting innocent citizens."

15. Watch Adric's badge. He took it off to pick the police box lock in the last episode, but is wearing it again now.

16. But he seems to have lost it going through the Tardis doors!

17. Costume continuity is maintained in the studio sequences independently of what was happening on film.

18. The extras provided their own police uniforms.

19. During pre-production, Peter Grimwade considered also putting the DI into uniform.

20. Some of Tom Georgeson's scenes were left incomplete on the rainy Friday.

21. He came back on the Monday to finish them,

22. helpfully making his own way to and from the location.

23. Bidmead imagined the Tardis in terms of a microcomputer,

24. with its interior space organised in the same way as a computer allocates space to files.

25. So if the system is running slow, space can be freed up by deleting rooms.

26. Romana's room is not ditched in the first draft; the change was made late in pre-production, on 3 December 1980.

27. Adric now replaces his wayward badge!

28. When John Nathan-Turner announced that he was looking for a bossy Australian,

29. a friend told him they didn't come any bossier than Janet Fielding.

30. Like many actors, Janet was creative about herself at her audition.

31. For one thing, she understated her age to fit the character brief.

32. She also improvised when Nathan-Turner mentioned that, at 5'2", she was too short to be an air stewardess.

33. In Australia, she claimed, the height requirement was reduced to accommodate diminutive Far-Eastern applicants.

34. "Though still frightened," says the script, "she is also full of curiosity

35. "and a kind of rising indignation at the absurdity of the place."

36. The producer briefed costume designer June Hudson to create a "sexy" uniform for Tegan.

37. The first design was a black-and-white air hostess outfit with a touch of vivid colour.

38. In the script, she says the Tardis is "completely and utterly daft".

39. Janet Fielding thought her skirt was too short.

40. When seated, she kept unconsciously tugging the hem down between takes.

41. The hat was uncomfortable, too.

42. It didn't sit naturally on her head, and had to be pinned to her hair to keep it on.

43. They met Nyssa and her father Tremas in the previous serial, 'The Keeper of Traken',

44. at the end of which we saw the Master steal Tremas's body.

45. Tom Baker kept himself a little distant during recording.

46. Partly he was watching what had been his show pass into the hands of markedly younger people.

47. He was also looking forward to his next job.

48. He'd been booked to play his favourite author, Oscar Wilde, at the Chichester Festival in the spring.

49. "Or in our Tardis," retorts Adric in the script.

50. "Quite," concurs the Doctor. "But at least we keep the problem in the family."

51. He later points out, "we Time Lords have an obligation to deal with him ourselves without endangering others".

52. When the Doctor lands in the air and hovers, Adric doesn't understand: Why not just do as he originally said and materialise underwater?

53. The Doctor explains that this way he can first make sure they've landed in the right place.

54. The aerial view of London in the next shot was supplied by the firm Aerofilms.

55. In the script, Adric is surprised the Doctor isn't going to use one of Earth's oceans,

56. but the Doctor says this way they won't have so far to swim.

57. "I don't think this particular sort of spring-cleaning has ever been tried before," he adds.

58. Adric objects that he can't just abandon the Tardis, but that's not the plan:

59. "As soon as we've got rid of the Master, I'll materialise the Tardis somewhere out of the way and turn it inside out."

60. As script editor, Bidmead put problem-solving at the centre of the Doctor's adventures.

61. He disliked a tendency he saw in earlier Doctor Who series to resolve issues with mere technobabble.

62. He felt that this was really just using the modern equivalent of magic to evaporate out of a difficult situation.

63. Instead, he wanted to apply what he called "the discipline of extrapolated real life".

64. The Doctor would look at problems objectively,

65. and then find a way out of them by applying knowledge and principles derived from experience.

66. The plan to flush out the Tardis developed from the idea of a second, interloping Tardis inside the Doctor's.

67. Having put it in, Bidmead then had to think of a way of getting it out again,

68. and this scheme appealed to him because of its inherent danger:

69. A desperate measure for a desperate situation.

70. At first he thought of actually staging this, until the budget put a damper on it,

71. and forced him to come up with the false landing instead.

72. This was shot on 16 December 1980 at Cadogan Pier on the Chelsea Embankment.

73. In the script, they're on a mudflat by the riverbank: Dry land "(well, relatively)".

74. In the earliest version, Tegan encounters the Master himself, lurking in the shadows.

75. This was amended to save calling Anthony Ainley into the studio that day.

76. The Master's voice-over laughter was added in post-production.

77. The serial is structured so that Ainley was only required on five production days, four in the studio and one on location.

78. In the script, he elaborates: The Master is "an old enemy, something I understand. There's too much that's unfamiliar in all this."

79. That is, he says in response to Adric's half-asked question, "why I've been more than usually irascible".

80. This is the Albert Bridge, built in 1873.

81. The stranger doesn't beckon in the script.

82. The camera's looking west, with Battersea Bridge and Power Station in the background.

83. In pre-production, it was proposed to dress the distant stranger in a version of the Doctor's waistcoat and breeches.

84. The eventual costume was made by June Hudson's assistant, Roger Oldhamstead.

85. It consisted of multiple layers of tattered tulle over a base made of white cotton T-shirt material.

86. Because the character is never seen in close-up, the costume was designed for general effect rather than for detail.

87. The Doctor and the stranger "stand facing each other like duellists," says the script.

88. What follows looks from afar like a heated debate,

89. with the Doctor gesticulating earnestly and the stranger "adamantly against whatever point the Doctor is making".

90. Janet Fielding's contract was issued on 23 October 1980, and guaranteed her a minimum engagement of twelve episodes.

91. In other words, there was an option for Tegan to leave Doctor Who two serials into the 1982 series.

92. Her character brief gives a sense of how the production team envisaged her developing during that period.

93. She has a "brash confidence in her own abilities'which'conceals inner insecurity,

94. "a state of affairs that becomes clear in moments of stress".

95. From the start, "Tegan's superficial self-assurance will build until it becomes a real problem" for her two fellow travellers.

96. "It will need drastic action on the part of the Doctor to put things to rights and show her the error of her ways."

97. Suitably chastised, she would then either leave the Tardis or continue as a series regular.

98. "The Doctor is always dipping into the future, which then becomes the present," observed Barry Letts.

99. "What he should say, surely, is, 'I have dipped into ourfuture,' which is subtly different."

100. "On Earth they call it 'bad luck'," he says in the script. "We're in for a run of it, a storm of it, a positive earthquake of 'bad luck'."

101. "Seen from above, the city looks something like a human brain,

102. "its alleyways being deep involutions into the smooth pale rose rock."

103. In the earliest version, it is actually modelled on a human cerebral cortex by Block Transfer Computation.

104. "The narrow winding streets act as whispering galleries, passing the susurration of encoded information

105. "from one end of the City to the other as it is manipulated and developed by the citizens."

106. The Logopolitans wear yellow chiffon robes with brown polyester bodysuits.

107. The costumes were originally made for the Argolin plant people in the first adventure of the 1980-1 series, 'The Leisure Hive'.

108. The bodysuits were originally yellow, but June Hudson tried dying them black for 'Logopolis'.

109. The polyester wouldn't hold the dye, so they came out brown.

110. Black velvet capes and hoods were added to create the intended colour balance.

111. Originally she was going to be called either "Tegan" or "Jovanka" (as a first name).

112. An Australian friend of John Nathan-Turner's had a niece named Tegan,

113. and Jovanka came from Jovanka Broz (born 1924),

114. who was in the news in May 1980 after the death of her husband, President Tito of Yugoslavia.

115. Finding the short-list on Nathan-Turner's desk, Bidmead mistook it for the character's full name: Tegan Jovanka.

116. Later in the script, Tegan remarks that the Doctor has come to Logopolis to try out "some kind of new trim" for the Tardis.

117. "I arrive with a somewhat enlarged entourage," apologises the Doctor in the script.

118. The Monitor is played by John Fraser (born 1931).

119. Early in his career he was often cast as pretty young men,

120. like Lord Alfred Douglas in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960)

121. And Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1964).

122. He'd worked with Peter Grimwade before, on the mystery serial, The Doll (1975),

123. in which Grimwade had been impressed with the way Fraser's performance enhanced what he considered to be a weak script.

124. Make-up artist Dorka Nieradzik saw the Logopolitans as a monastic people.

125. She wanted to create an impression of their immense age and great intellect,

126. so she gave them enlarged prosthetic brains on the backs of their heads.

127. John Fraser's brain was custom-made from a cast of his own head, but the fifteen extras were supplied with generic ones.

128. The prosthetics were made of latex, and fitted over a bald cap, with white wigs to complete the effect.

129. In the script, the Monitor says it's "more than we need for our immediate researches. Backup facilities."

130. Barry Letts pointed out that the Master's Tardis sticks out like a sore thumb

131. because there are no other Ionic columns on Logopolis.

132. The script makes it clear that, though this looks like a computer screen, it's actually just a dark hole: In effect, a speaking tube.

133. The whispering noise as the numbers are passed from cell to cell was created by sound effects designer Dick Mills.

134. He began by muttering gibberish into a tape recorder.

135. The sound was then re-recorded at various speeds and multi-tracked to create the effect.

136. The script refers to the "opalescent" sky of Logopolis.

137. Bidmead imagined the planet on the analogy of a computer.

138. Complex problems are broken down into a series of individual calculations which travel along the streets.

139. The "central logic room" here is the computer's registry,

140. and the Monitor is the interface with the user, in this case the Doctor and his friends.

141. That's why the Monitor is the only one who can talk, or needs to.

142. The cell's scripted contents include: "simple cooking instruments, a pallet on the floor,"

143. and "a neat row of what might be the Logopolitan equivalent of books".

144. Before becoming Doctor Who's script editor, Bidmead had worked as both an actor and a technical journalist.

145. He later co-edited The Micro Enquirer, a 1984 manual for users of the BBC microcomputer.

146. In the script, she accuses them of "flying under false colours".

147. The Monitor reminds the Doctor why the room is familiar: "Your extensive travels put us stay-at-homes to shame.

148. "Doubtless on one of your trips to the planet Earth you have visited the Pharos Project."

149. Block Transfer Computation was inspired by the way a computer's microprocessor copies data.

150. Early processors could only do this piecemeal, datum by datum,

151. but Christopher Bidmead's new computer was powered by a Zilog Z80,

152. which had a machine code instruction for transferring data in large blocks.

153. This led on to the idea of manipulating a block of data mathematically as it was copied:

154. Block Transfer Computation.

155. "But the life is too intelligent to do that before it knows what the Earth people are up to!"

156. Quips the Doctor in the script.

157. John Nathan-Turner was delighted by a review in The Stage, the trade newspaper,

158. praising the range and variety of the costumes in the series.

159. The reviewer had not noticed that the Logopolitan costumes were re-used as an economy measure.

160. Hoping to pull off the same trick twice, he asked June Hudson

161. to retain them after recording for a possible third outing.

162. In the script, the Monitor and the Doctor collaborate in this "small deception" before the Doctor goes in.

163. The Doctor describes it as "an elementary eggs and basket situation".

164. In the draft script, the Logopolitans are explicitly a stay-at-home people,

165. in contrast with the peripatetic Doctor.

166. Tegan doesn't understand this: "I don't know what you've got against travelling. I love travelling."

167. So she's a lot less bolshy about being on Logopolis, because that's travel too.

168. The dialogue was amended after Barry Letts pointed out the contradiction in her attitude.

169. Nyssa featured in every draft of 'Logopolis' from its earliest outline.

170. That was a gamble, because it was only on 5 November, after the scripts had been drafted,

171. that Sarah Sutton was invited to become a series regular. Fortunately she agreed!

172. Her contract was issued five days later, on 10 November.

173. Like Tegan, Nyssa was initially taken on for just three serials.

174. It remained a possibility that Peter Davison's Doctor

175. might end up travelling with only Adric for company.

176. Also seen in this episode were:

177. George Ballantine, Douglas Bather, Jim Delaney (Logopolitans)

178. Billy Gray, Jimmy Mac, Brychan Powell (Logopolitans)

179. Terry Randle, Evan Ross, Roy Seeley (Logopolitans)

180. Uncredited production contributors included:

181. Graham Richmond (Film Operations Manager)

182. Joe Bates, Ray Davis (Film Ops)

183. Arthur Goldthorpe, Mike Smith (Film Ops)

184. Dave Gorringe (Film Lighting)

185. Blaize Bettinson, Jayne Buxton, Sarah Grispo (Make-Up Assistants)

186. Tim Humphries (Film Sound Assistant)

187. John Daly (Film Camera Assistant)

188. John Phillips (Grips)

189. Peter Vandrill (Location Catering)